Losing Battles (27 page)

“Fresh back from Parchman, sir, ain’t had his dinner yet either, any more than you or I. But there’s a plenty of everything where you and Mrs. Judge are invited if you hurry right now. They’re only waiting on sight of me to sit down,” Jack said.

The air rang as if all the pots and pans had dropped at once onto the iron top of a kitchen range somewhere. Gradually the reverberations died down.

“What was that?” Mrs. Moody asked, her hand on Judge Moody.

“That was good old Banner bridge,” Jack said. “The church bus has just made it to the other side.” He jumped to Mr. Willy’s team and took hold of the white mule’s bridle. “You could carry these folks to my house, couldn’t you, Mr. Willy?”

“Don’t approve of Sunday pleasure riders. And I ain’t going to carry no crying baby anywhere—anything I do hate, it’s baby-crying.”

“You don’t hear Lady May. She’s sound asleep now,” Gloria said in a whisper.

“All right, let ’em climb on and see if I will,” said Mr. Willy. He spoke to the mules, and after they each took a juicy bite of
cosmos they brought the wagon up out of the ditch and waited there.

“Look at your old wagon coming apart, Mr. Willy,” said Etoyle as she skinned up the side and peeped in.

The high sides, like a skimpily mended fence, had missing places as wide as windows between some of the uprights. Scraps of lumber were visible lying on the floor by a pile of quilts, and a quota of chairs stood in a double row. The wagon gave off a smell like a busy sawmill’s.

“Other people won’t give me a chance to fix my own, girlie,” said Mr. Willy. “They just won’t leave me alone.” He turned sideways on the seat and said to the Judge, “I’ll sharpen your plough-point, mend your harness, fix your wife’s sewing machine, and the rest of it. Banner’s my home. Try me.” His hat, that he wore year-round, had its wintry, dust-packed brim pulled down like a black sunbonnet around his withered cheeks.

“Just a minute,” said Mrs. Moody. “Just one minute!” She elbowed past her husband to go around and get a look at the wagon from behind. “Oscar, this is the very same old fellow that started our trouble this morning, and I said I hoped I was never going to see him again on my road.”

Judge Moody stood beside her. “Well, you’ve hit on a fact,” he said. “Old man, you wouldn’t let my car pass you, I’d have had to go in the ditch—”

“Well, to let you pass me,
I’d
had to go in the ditch,” said Mr. Willy. “Figure it out.”

“—and finally you turned right across the road in front of me, and forced me—”

“Thought everybody knew that’s where I lived,” said Mr. Willy. Only Etoyle, scampering over the wagon, laughed.

“Well, Maud Eva, and here we are in the heat of sun,” said Judge Moody. “Now that you know the worst, do you think you can bring yourself to mounting this wagon and getting under the shelter of this boy’s roof, and leaving the car where it is?”

“Oh, the car’s not going to fall now. It’s certainly been given every opportunity there is to fall,” said Mrs. Moody in a surprised and almost offended tone of voice. “If the Lord had intended my car to fall, don’t you think He’d have gone ahead and seen about it before all this came along? I do.”

Judge Moody turned around, plodded to the foot of the bank and called in a hoarse voice up to Aycock. “Now I expect to find this
car right in the same place when I get back. And you still in it. Is that understood?”

“Are you-all saying good-bye?” Aycock called.

“Can I trust you?”

“Yes sir, you can trust me,” called down Aycock. “Anybody that wants to is welcome to trust me.”

“Sure you can, sir. Aycock’s the best friend I got and my closest neighbor,” Jack said. “I only hope your Buick was listening as well as he was to what you said.”

“Speaking of excuses nobody in their right minds would believe,” said Mrs. Moody, pointing up at the Buick, “if you’d tried to
make up
an excuse for not getting where you were going, Oscar, you couldn’t have beat that.”

“I’m not much on making excuses, Maud Eva—”

“It’s the last thing they’d believe,” she said, still pointing. “The real excuse doesn’t ever carry weight at all. It’s just as well you’re not going to get the chance to offer it.”

Judge Moody was leading her to the wagon. The nailed-on ladder came down the wagon side nearly to the road. Mrs. Moody put her foot up. “All right, Oscar, but just remember this was
your
decision.”

“Is this your ice, Mr. Willy?” Down in the bed of the wagon, Etoyle lifted the quilt from what it was covering. “Who’s that for?” she asked as she jumped from the high board side into Jack’s arms.

“Nobody from Banner,” Jack told her with a pat on the head, and she danced away.

“Oscar, do you see what I see?” Mrs. Moody bumped back against the Judge. “Honestly!”

It was a new pine coffin, still a little rough-looking—the source of the medicinal smell that had kept coming out of the wagon while it waited in the road.

“I’m the artist,” said Mr. Willy Trimble. “Got the lining to fit it with, and plane it some more. I’m just going down to the old sawmill.” He nodded toward Banner. “There’s still a whole raft of cedar boards back in yonder from Dearman’s time, laying in that wilderness of honeysuckle. Pretty well seasoned by now. Any fellow can go stepping in there and help himself to some sound timber if he ain’t afeared of snakes. Nobody to tell him halt. I’m finishing up this one special for a present. Aim to carry it across the river to Alliance.”
He took his hat off and folded it to point with into the distance ahead.

“Well, sir, you can just carry it
right on
,” said Mrs. Moody. “Go right on to Alliance, and without benefit of the Moodys’ company. Go on, shoo!” She stamped her foot in the road. “Get up, horse!” she cried to the mules.

Mr. Willy put his hat back on. A wasp staggered from its brim, then, carrying its legs like a basket, took off swinging into the air. He brought out into Banner Road and rattled off down it and disappeared around the blind curve, leaving them his dust.

“You didn’t really hurt his feelings,” Etoyle told Mrs. Moody. “Mama says it can’t be done, no matter how hard you might try.”

At the same time, another clatter filled their ears. A whirlwind of dust was rising on the home track. The same as the other time, Vaughn came at them driving the mule from a stand on the seat of the wagon as though all their lives depended on him. Bet jumped the ditch and the wagon seemed for a moment to fly to pieces, but before it could turn over, Jack got the mule halted.

“What does Mama say?” he asked Vaughn, picking him up from the road and setting him back on the seat.

“Said even if the world was coming to an end here, the reunion was ready to sit down.”

“All right, Vaughn. I believe we’re as ready as they are. But who you’re carrying to the table is Judge and Mrs. Judge Moody.”

Vaughn opened his mouth. Jack helped Mrs. Moody and the Judge up onto the spring seat beside him.

“What word do I take Mama along with ’em?” Vaughn broke out.

“Mama knows what to do.” Jack said. “Just keep down to a trot and don’t spill ’em. The rest of us will walk it and get there the same time as you,” he told the Moodys.

“The school bus!” yelled Vaughn, in the minute between when his old dust faded and his new dust was still to be raised. “Look where you put the Banner School bus!”

“You got it to keep up with for a whole year, Vaughn. You ought to’ve started sooner,” said Jack. He gave Bet a spank.

At the last minute, Etoyle sprang and made a jump into the wagon. She dropped down into the hay behind the Moodys and smiled at them.

“No, Mischief, you can’t hold my baby again,” Gloria said, as Etoyle held out her arms from the moving wagon. “She didn’t get up Lover’s Leap all by herself.”

“And here
we
go up this funny little road,” said Mrs. Moody.

As though he needed to wring out something, Judge Moody wrung out his handkerchief, then scraped it over his cheeks and brow and tied it on again.

When the dust began to rise behind the wagon, Etoyle stood and waved at the only one she could still see above it, Aycock. “Sweet dreams!” she called. The smile of pure happiness on her face was the same one she’d welcomed Jack home with this morning.

“How late is it drawing on to be?” Aycock called.

“Don’t fret. One of my sisters’ll find her way back to pitch you a chicken leg,” said Jack.

“Stop her. I want a can of sardines and a can of Vyenna sausages and a pick to punch it open. And the kind of pickles Miss Ora Stovall knows so well how to cure,” he called. “Those’re what I been homesick for.”

“Save ’em for Saturday,” Jack advised.

“Can I keep Queenie? She’ll be good, she’s the mother dog.”

“She took off, leading those two other scampers. They’ll get home without you. But I’ll run tell your mama you’re safe and sound before she sets in to calling you,” said Jack.

Now he and Gloria and the sleeping baby were the only ones in the road, and the sound of all wheels had faded. He set his hands in place around her waist and asked, “Ready for home?”

They started up the track, and Jack steered them toward the well. Its smell came to meet them, like that of a teakettle that has been steaming away, out of mind, on the back of the stove all day. Under the big pine was Gloria’s satchel lying forgotten, already velvety pink. The wooden cover over the well had the heat of a platter under the Sunday hen. Through Jack’s hands the rope ran down in a long coarse stocking of red, and then he drew the bucket up on its shrieking pulley. They shared the glassful. Then Jack, looking at Gloria’s face, poured her another glassful and handed it to her.

“You can count on one thing, Gloria,” he told her. “Before the day’s out I’m going to see that you get your good-byes said to your Miss Julia Mortimer.”

She spilled the water and dropped the glass. “Jack!”

“You needn’t have worried—I wasn’t going to let you get carried off by a gaggle of geese,” he said, brushing the drops off her skirt, chasing the glass. “We ain’t that bad off yet, that my wife has to be
come after
in time of trouble. We still got a wagon and mule to our names.”

“Are you sending me back where I came from?” she cried.

“I’m carrying you. I’m going with you, not letting you go anywhere by yourself, sweetheart.”

“I don’t want to go! I’ve
said
my good-byes to Miss Julia!”

“But she’s the one who was good to you. Your main encourager.”

“Then listen! Miss Julia Mortimer didn’t encourage me to marry you, Jack!” cried Gloria.

“What?”

“She was against it and gave that out for her opinion.”

The pupils of his shocked eyes nearly overflowed the blue. “
Why
?”

“She said it promised too well for future trouble.”

“She came out with the bare naked words?”

“Trouble and hardship.”

“Gloria, next to losing Grandpa, this is the worst news to welcome me yet,” he said.

“And the only letter I ever did find in that mailbox for me was from her,” said Gloria.

“What did it say? Get it out, honey,” said Jack.

Gloria hugged the baby closer. “It said for me to come to Alliance and she’d tell me what would become of me. To my face,” she whispered. “I never went!”

“Because how could you get there?” he said. “You couldn’t even get to Parchman to beg for me.”

“ ‘Don’t marry in too big a hurry,’ she said.”

“Possum, then what would she have had you do?”

“Teach, teach, teach!” Gloria cried. “Till I dropped in harness! Like the rest of ’em!”

He gripped her.

“Do you blame me for keeping out of her sight?” she asked.

“But it was so remarkable of her,” he said, staring. “She knew what would happen without even laying eyes on me. Didn’t even know me.”

“She knew
of
you.”

He held her close to him, her face spangled with its freckles and beginning tears as if dragonfly wings were laid across it. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry about it now,” he said, his cheek on hers.

“I waited so long on today! I thought I was ready for anything, if you’d just come—reunion or no reunion. Then first Judge Moody and now Miss Julia Mortimer! I blame them both for where we find ourselves right now.”

“You can’t blame who you love,” he said.

“I can. I blame Miss Julia Mortimer.”

“You can’t blame somebody after they’re dead,” he said.

“I can.”

As they stared at each other, he suddenly jumped her aside, for a wasp came swinging toward her temple, like a weight on a thread. He beat it off, beat the air all around her, stamped on the wasp, and brushed her carefully again, although nothing had touched her. Nothing had bothered the baby, who lay against Gloria’s bosom, open-mouthed in sleep.

“
You
can’t blame anybody
living
,” she accused him.

“Now I can’t blame Judge Moody. He saved—” He drew her near, stroking her forehead, pushing her dampening hair behind her ears.

“Sending for me to tell me what she thought of our future! An old maid, and a hundred and one years old!”